Frameline
29, now officially the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, is a
grab bag - 110 programs with a special emphasis this year on queer folk in the
sports. Eleven feature programs, four fiction features, including two sexy
German romps -- Summer Storm on high school rowing champions and Guys
and Balls giving a very detailed look at a queer soccer team's efforts to
break through the locker room pink ceiling - and seven documentaries - Girl
Wrestler, The Lady Is A Champ and Lesbian Grandmothers From Mars
plus a select number of shorts including a beautiful title Gay Volleyball
Saved My Life.
The festival returns this year to
an old venue, The Victoria, with the balance of the programs at the stately
Castro and the financially embattled Roxie. Plus four nights of programs will
be screened, despite some political fireworks, at Oakland's Parkway Theatre
(near Lake Merritt).
Finally Frameline honors Gregg
Araki for an astonishingly charged body of personal cinema - eight works to
date, from the Reagan era screwball comedy, The Long Weekend (O' Despair),
his Big Chill to his gorgeous HIV positive boys on the lam, The
Living End, a signature work of The New Queer Cinema to his The Kids Are
Not All Right trilogy - Totally F**KED Up, The Doom Generation
and Nowhere, gutsy films with authentic teen slang and the lovely Jimmy
Duval. Unfortunately no Araki films will be screened at the festival, but his
greatest work to date, the amazing adaptation of Scott Heim's novel Mysterious
Skin is currently unfolding at the Clay and on selected screens throughout
America.
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Summer
Storm. Director Marco Kreuzpainter's Summer Storm tests
the friendship and sanity of a pair of Bavarian high school students as their
rowing team competes to be all German champions. Blond Tobi (the volatile
Robert Stadlober channels the ferocious sensuality of the younger Michael York)
has the hots for brunet Achim his best friend and rowing team partner. When Achim
acquires a blonde girlfriend, Sandra, Tobi makes the mistake of professing
interest in Anke, a brown haired member of the women's team. Tobi and Achim's
friendship has always accommodated a high level of strenuous foreplay
(wrestling leading to jack-off contests) as well as drunken bowling games and
plans to see the world together. But now that Achim has emerged as a
"hardcore" straight boy, Tobi risks being seen as either dishonest or
foolish unless he too finds a suitable object of desire. Fate plays its hand
when the Berlin women's team drops out of competition to be replaced by the
"Queerstrokes" an impossibly out team of horny boy rowers whose
leader professes that "straight boys make great toys." The Queerstrokes
team becomes a great device for spoofing the sex obsessed world view of many
young gays as well comically amplifying the debate about flaunting one's
sexuality that occurs around Pride Day celebrations.
Like the Spanish vacation romp Nico
and Dani, Summer Storm envisions a world where adolescents find
their affections and orientation up for grabs with the outcome a bit more
important than winning gold, silver or bronze. Summer Storm asks whether
gays too can turn into sex bullies, whether homos should join heteros in
competing for the erotically uncommitted or undecided as well as the stakes for
hetero females when boys openly chase after boys. Stadlober's Tobi is thoroughly
convincing as a homo virgin whose loins, heart and conscience will be tested
far more severely than his rowing skills. Set in an impossibly beautiful slice
of country that will conjure up the best and worst memories of summer camp, the
film's main drawback lies in its portrait of adult youth leaders as mostly
clueless idiots. (Castro/6-18)
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Cote
d'Azur. This intergenerational sex farce is fueled by a
longhaired French boy, Charly, whose frequent nocturnal showers convince his
mother, Beatrix, that he's in love with his gay friend Martin, while convincing
his father, Marc, to ration the hot water. Adding cell phones and gay male
cruising haunts to the normal farce formula of slamming doors and revolving
beds, Cote d'Azur gives us an extended French family where every member
has a naughty secret. A funny/sweet ode to unorthodox family ties from the
directors of The Adventures of Felix and My Life on Ice --
Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau. (Castro/Opening Night)
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My
Summer of Love. This offbeat tale of young lust in West Yorkshire
features female star crossed lovers who shouldn't meet outside the pages of an
English novel. Mona (Natalie Press exudes the repressed yearnings of a young
Sissy Spacek) is a depressed redhead who hates everything about her dead end
life including her stupid nickname (a joke on the Mona Lisa). Mona's once
beloved older brother has returned from a stint in prison to turn their dead
parents' tavern into a Holy Roller wayside chapel. Mona's life takes a fateful
turn when she encounters a young woman on horseback. Tamsin (Emily Blunt) is a
bored and slightly too imaginative rich girl moping the summer away at a
suspiciously empty family estate. The Polish born filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski
has adapted Helen Cross' 1984 novel about striking coal miners by stripping
away its social realist baggage, including a crazed sex maniac, and
substituting a lyrically pessimistic central European sensibility. You keep
praying for Mona to get a life, instead she must chose between a religiously besotted
brother -- who in the film's transcendent moment leads a pack of unemployed
sheep farmers erecting a giant cross on a hill overlooking their valley -- and
a cello playing girlfriend who assures Mona that "in France crimes of
passion are forgiven." Not your typical soppy school girl romp in the sun.
(Yerba Buena/Opening Gala)
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The
Joy of Life. Jenni Olson's awesome debut feature is actually two
film novellas that straddle the parallel themes of ultimate joy and despair -
one found in the embrace of a lover, the other in a desperate leap from one of
the world's most heartbreakingly beautiful landmarks.
The first novella describes the
darkly funny, bittersweet longings of a romantic butch dyke for all the many
girls in her life. As read by transgender "queer boy/dyke" actor
Harriet "Harry" Dodge, the narrator character teases us with juicy
tidbits from a thousand and one nights of good and bad dates. Olson employs a
poetic ode to the painterly light of San Francisco, read by Beat guru Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
to transition gently into the dark second novella that confronts the siren call
of the Golden Gate Bridge for troubled souls, specifically as the site of her
friend Mark's fatal leap in 1995. Olson deftly juxtaposes the origins of Frank
Capra's Meet John Doe, with its twin themes of suicide and messianic
Christianity.
Olson explores this city's at times
irksome prettiness to reveal why transcendent beauty is not an end in itself.
In her screen persona Olson has Dodge assure us that sex may be the most
important resource for surviving life in the too beautiful city. "In the
moment of desiring and being desired you actually realize that you're
okay." (Castro/6-17)
Born
In a Barn. There's nothing as odd as preparing to laugh at
another person's fetish and then finding yourself mildly seduced if not
completely won over. Elizabeth Elson's subtly hypnotic documentary, on people
who like to pretend they're horses and have other people ride them, succeeds in
making the case for pony play. Hosted by a leather clad bear of a guy
(Trigger), the film places special emphasis on how pony play provides a sexy
safe place for women. Part of Pups and Ponies program. (Roxie/6-19)
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The
Lady In Question Is Charles Busch. Charles Busch is not your
typical gender challenged Jewish boy who spends a life in the theatre uttering
cheap sentiments in gaudy frocks and bad wigs. Born to a wannabe opera singer
father and a mother who died of heart failure when he was seven, Charles was
rescued from academic oblivion by a maiden aunt - literally his own Auntie Mame
- who ushered him into a career in the arts - his collegiate debut drew the
headline "Degeneracy Reigns at Northwestern" after he and a best
friend appeared as a pair of Siamese twin show girls named Hester and Esther.
The new documentary from directors
John Catalina and Charles Ignacio begins with the opening night excitement of
Busch's 2000 Broadway hit play, The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, to
tell the improbable rise to East Village stardom of a movie besotted kid. The Allergist's
Wife gave Busch all the trappings of big time show biz success - A Tony
Award, bigger if not big bucks, he could now afford the very best wigs, caricatures
by Al Hirscfeld, more money for his second film, Die Mommie Die -
exactly the kind of success that the movie actresses he so admired achieved in
their lifetimes.
The Film gives an exhaustive and
very amusing portrait of the seven crucial years when Busch and friends
established themselves as "the theatre company-in-residence" at The
Limbo Lounge, a East Side New York punk club so lacking in amenities that the
male performers resorted to tin cans on their bathroom breaks. Busch jokes that
all his early frocks bore urine stained hems. The videos of those shows,
subtitled for the camp impaired, with their unforgettable titles - Vampire
Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party -- reveal in time lapse
fashion how a kitschy sub-theatrical genre evolved from a good night's giggle
for those in the know - a hilarious moment has a nubile Charles as "Chicklet"
complaining sans bra that he'll never "fill out" --. to a fully
realized body of seven plays with performances that can literally break your
heart.
The Lady In Question
explores how lucky and accidental a seemingly inevitable triumph can be. Busch
had resisted doing drag, it was only after his brilliant one-man shows proved
too rarefied for popular taste that he stumbled into writing his
Theatre-In-Limbo plays. Busch says his ambition was not to wear a dress but
merely capture the astonishing spirit of the ladies of Hollywood's classic
pre-60's period. The film highlights the moment when his own life was as much
at risk as any of his chased by Nazi heroines. (Castro/6-17 &
Victoria/6-18)
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Kiki
and Herb on the Rocks. Now I certainly can't recommend that you
sneak a 40 ounce malt beverage or even a little nip of a more fashionable sort
into the Castro Theatre (My God!) but be warned that Kiki and Herb are best
received in an altered state of consciousness. The San Francisco originated
"boozy chanteusie" and her "silent" piano playing younger
partner are, of course the stage identities of Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman,
only recently retired after nice run off-Broadway, and now back for a live on
video encore. The video by director Mike Nicholls (note the spelling) captures
our friends in character as they hop a ride from Heathrow Airport to what
they're supposing is a night at The Palace. A disreputable and perhaps leaky
houseboat is their actual destination and home to the bawdy stylings and filthy
adlibs of Kiki DuRane. Kiki and Herb will always be special here - what the
hell, if they weren't received by the Queen, at least they met Emile Hirsch (on
the set of Imaginary Heroes). (Castro/6-22)
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Blackmail
Boy. I've lived most of my adult life over a very nice Greek
family in the Castro. I've sometimes wondered what would have befallen me if I
had rented from the not so nice Greeks, who make up the entire population of Blackmail
Boy. The very humpy Christos helps his mom in the family run bakery when
he's not being butt boy to a sleazy town official, Giorgos. There are actually
very few citizens in this small Aegean community that Christos has not been
naked with. As Almodovar put it in his description of Bad Education, sex for
people like this is not so much a pleasure but a pain for the other person. Not
as witty as Pedro at his best but just as dark. The MacGuffin is straight out
of The O.C. - a family property whose value has skyrocketed because Giorgos'
boss wants it for a park.
Someone gets shot, someone else
gets a very big check and a one way ride out of town. Our pretty boy is fully
serviced with several well deserved beatings and one video taped blow job.
Loved every raunchy minute but I'm still glad my pies are baked by a very
different tribe of Greeks. A future must have DVD from directors Thanasis Papathanasiou
and Michalis Reppas. (Victoria/6-19)
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Poster
Boy. A terrifically conceived political/sexual melodrama about
the outing of the son of a conservative Republican senator from North Carolina.
Zak Tucker combines a quirky stylized video approach that makes you feel like
you're on stage with a great cast. As the story begins Henry Kray (Matt Newton
is sensational as the impulsive, conflicted young man) is telling a seasoned
old New York political reporter the story of how he screwed his father by
kissing a cute trick on the same podium dad was using to opine about
"compassionate conservatism." Henry is a bomb ticking away on what
has become a short fuse. He explains at one point how the only time he didn't
feel a prisoner in a political cage is when he was sucking cock in a public
restroom. Only then could he believe that he wasn't merely the senator's son
A terrific supporting cast includes
Michael Lerner as the crafty/bullying Senator Jack Kray, with this guy the
wheels are always turning, everything is politics; Karen Allen is sharp and
saucy as the senator's long suffering wife who's developing some backbone; and
Jack Noseworthy is sublimely crafty as Anthony, the ACT Up trick from hell, the
one guy who doesn't observe Henry's one night stand rule.
While the oddly paced video and the
framing device of the reporter's interview at first distance us from the
story's real heat, gradually all the pieces click into place and the result is
more vivid than the usual well shot film about politics.
Originally designed as a Primary
Colors like production for the late Herbert Ross, the production was scaled
back (with Newton inheriting a lead slated for Billy Crudup) but the message
about the treacherous treatment the queer cause receives from both the left and
the right is if anything emphasized by the experimental nature of its delivery.
Both young leads are far sexier than the program photo indicates. Newton
especially gives a very nuanced take on a character who's growing and changing
before our eyes. Not to be missed. (Victoria/6-19)
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Ned
Rorem: Word and Music. In his prime Ned Rorem was one of the sexiest
men on the planet (although he confesses in a diary entry not to be his own
type), a protege of celebrity bisexual composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein, a
gifted young artist who spent the 50's rent free in Paris courtesy of a female
patron. His diaries chart the ebb and flow of a gay jet set from the 40's
through the 60's, later his diaries would record the everydayness of the plague
years. Rorem thinks of himself first and foremost as a Twentieth Century
composer - over fifty hours of music to his credit, a body of work unheard by
most queer ears under fifty. Filmmakers James Dowell and John Kolomvakis
followed Rorem with their cameras for nearly a decade (the subject jokes about
dying before seeing the final product), in the process talking to some of the
great gay divas of Roerm's era - Alan Ginsberg, Don Bachardy (it's a little odd
to hear the 70 something painter speaking with his late lover Christopher Isherwood's
high pitched reedy British accent) and Paul Bowels. The emphasis is on the
music rather than the sex, but it's a beautiful ride all the way.
(Victoria/6-19)
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Happy
Endings. Don Roos -- mastermind behind the smartest queer
friendly comedy for the nineties, The Opposite of Sex - returns with a
very worthy follow up. Happy Endings features deftly overlapping stories
of ten obsessed lonely people with agendas beyond even their understanding --
Lisa Kudrow as middle-age woman dreading a meeting with a now grown child she
gave up for adoption; Jesse Bradford as a would be "indie" documentarian
who demands, at gunpoint, to be allowed to film Kudrow's reunion with her son;
Bobby Cannavale as barely documented Mexican immigrant who gives full body
massage to satisfied female clients and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a young woman torn
between simultaneous affairs with a rich guy (Tom Arnold) and his gay son
(Jason Ritter). (Castro/6-21)
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Show
Me. Ever imagine yourself holed up in a cozy cabin in the woods
for a weekend of hot snuggle time with your significant other. And then god has
different plans and you're bound and gagged in that same cabin with two certifiable
lunatics, two runaway teenagers, a girl and boy with a complicated shared past
and a very uncertain future. Canadian filmmaker Cassandra Nicolaou pushes this
taut set up to the breaking point with a trio of gifted young actors. As Sarah
(Michelle Nolden) sadly observes in the Opening frame, "There are two
kinds of people - those who rescue others and those who need to be
rescued." Sarah must decide if she should throw young Jackson (Kett Turton)
and Jenna Katharine Isabelle) to the wolves or adopt them as her kids. Show
Me is a psychological thriller, overflowing with erotic tension.
(Castro/6-21)